Black Folk Could Fly Selected Writings By Randall Kenan

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2022-08-09
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780393882179

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Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan by Randall Kenan Pdf

A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction. Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies and in small journals, revealing countless facets of Kenan’s life and work. Flying under the radar, these writings were his most personal and autobiographical: memories of the three women who raised him—a grandmother, a schoolteacher great-aunt, and the great-aunt’s best friend; recollections of his boyhood fear of snakes and his rapturous discoveries in books; sensual evocations of the land, seasons, and crops—the labor of tobacco picking and hog killing—of the eastern North Carolina lowlands where he grew up; and the food (oh the deliriously delectable Southern foods!) that sustained him. Here too is his intellectual coming of age; his passionate appreciations of kindred spirits as far-flung as Eartha Kitt, Gordon Parks, Ingmar Bergman, and James Baldwin. This powerful collection is a testament to a great mind, a great soul, and a great writer from whom readers will always wish to have more to read.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : North Carolina
ISBN : 0156505150

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Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories by Randall Kenan Pdf

This remarkable collection of twelve short stories is about the diverse folk--black and white, young and old, rich and poor, rural and sophisticated--who live in the eastern North Carolina town of Tims Creek. Among the memorable characters are Clarence Pickett, who at age three began receiving messages from beyond the grave and whose gift seems tied to a hog's ability to talk; matronly Ida Perry, haunted by a boy her judge husband may have drowned years before; Dean Williams, hired to seduce the richest black man in Times Creek, yearning after innocence while he betrays love.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 689 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2000-02-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780679737889

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Walking on Water by Randall Kenan Pdf

"A meaningful panoramic view of what it means to be human...Cause for celebration." --Times-Picayune From the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a moving, cliché-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century. In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2020-08-04
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781324005476

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If I Had Two Wings: Stories by Randall Kenan Pdf

Finalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.

Author : Randall Kenan,Randall, Kenan
Publisher : Grove Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2022-05-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780802159328

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A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan,Randall, Kenan Pdf

“With A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan continues James Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain.’”—San Francisco Chronicle When A Visitation of Spirits was published, Randall Kenan (1963-2020) was instantly recognized as a writer of significance, and one who brought into literary fiction the southern Black, gay experience, one of the first such writers to achieve mainstream success. His groundbreaking first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, is the powerful story of Horace Cross, a popular and high-achieving sixteen-year-old boy, who wrestles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of the small town of Tims Creek, North Carolina, where he grew up. Raised on stories of prophets, revelations, and dreams, his internal struggles take shape in his mind as demons and angels battling for his soul, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. A Visitation of Spirits established Randall Kenan as a literary master, and his influence continues to be felt. Now in Grove paperback and with an introduction by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Oscar-winning writer of Moonlight, A Visitation of Spirits is a classic novel of growing up from a literary giant.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Melville House
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2022-07-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781685890025

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The Fire This Time by Randall Kenan Pdf

“Kenan continues Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain’ by giving a voice to the unvarnished truth.”—The San Francisco Chronicle James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time was one of the essential books of the sixties, and one of the most galvanizing statements of the American civil rights movement. In The Fire This Time, inspired by Baldwin, Kenan combines elements of memoir and commentary, casting a critical eye from his childhood to the present to observe that, while there have been dramatic advances since the sixties, some issues continue to bedevil us. Starting with W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., Kenan expands the discussion to include many powerful Aamerican personalities, such as Oprah Winfrey, O. J. Simpson, Clarence Thomas, Rodney King, Sean “Puffy” Combs, George Foreman, and Barack Obama. Published to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of James Baldwin’s epochal work, The Fire This Time is itself a piercing consideration of the times, and an impassioned call to transcend them.

Author : Todd Davis
Publisher : MSU Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2022-02-01
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781628954623

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Coffin Honey by Todd Davis Pdf

In Coffin Honey, his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction—both personal and across ecosystems—are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. Each poem in Coffin Honey seeks to illuminate beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking nearer to in the twenty-first century. As with his past prize-winning volumes, Davis, whose work Orion Magazine likens to that of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”

Author : James Baldwin
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2011-09-06
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780307275967

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The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin Pdf

From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century—a collection of essays, articles, reviews, and interviews that have never before been gathered in a single volume. “An absorbing portrait of Baldwin’s time—and of him.” —New York Review of Books James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, “If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.”

Author : Jamila Minnicks
Publisher : Algonquin Books
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2023-01-10
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781643753744

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Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks Pdf

"With compelling characters and a heart-pounding plot, Jamila Minnicks pulled me into pages of history I’d never turned before."―Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times bestselling author of Demon Copperhead Winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, an enchanting and thought-provoking debut novel about a Black woman doing whatever it takes to protect all she loves on Alabama soil during the Civil Rights Movement. It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion—or worse—from the home they both hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town. Based on the history of the many Black towns and settlements established across the country, Jamila Minnicks's heartfelt and riveting debut is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America. Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize

Author : Steven G. Fullwood
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2007-01-01
Category : African American authors
ISBN : 0978625145

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Carry the Word by Steven G. Fullwood Pdf

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Twin Palms Publishers
Page : 106 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : African Americans
ISBN : UCSD:31822026080754

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A Time Not Here by Randall Kenan Pdf

A series of striking black and white photographs accompanied by text illustrate the life on the Mississippi Delta.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 696 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UOM:39015045974816

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Walking on Water by Randall Kenan Pdf

A profoundly moving and provocative account--both timely and enduring--of the thinking, the feelings, and the lives of African Americans in the nineties.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Mariner Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2023-08-22
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 006332525X

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Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan Pdf

"Nothing short of a wonder-book."--New York Times Book Review The story collection that hailed the arrival of an essential voice in southern literature--a sharp, rich exploration of what it means to poor, Black, and gay in the United States. A three-year-old boy begins to deliver messages from dead relatives. A zombie uprising is led by an evil preacher. A woman is haunted by a child her husband may have drowned. A pig talks. The stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead embody the type of fiction that defined Randall Kenan's career: set in the thinly veiled fictional Carolina town of Tims Creek, they follow a diverse cast of Southern folkways, and stare into a long shadow of history. A stunning mix of magic, myth, and folktales, Kenan masterfully portrays a world of varied voices, and in wondrous prose, brings to life the ghosts of our past and present.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 2966 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Biography
ISBN : 0837969751

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Who's who in America by Anonim Pdf